To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, 1969, I’m releasing the video of a song I wrote that includes that very scene as backdrop. The song is called “Miss America,” a raw tableau.

And how strange it is that the venerable Walter Cronkite, who defined that very moment, should pass right now. It’s as if he and Neil Armstrong will somehow launch into eternity together, in a fitting orbit.

I was in a second-rate hotel in Eureka, California the day the Apollo 11 crew landed. I was with my own merry band of pranksters on a cross country trip in my 1948 Cadillac hearse. As we descended into the hotel lobby, Cronkite’s voice crackled from a TV, saying something like, “What a great county…I just don’t understand these hippies…” The TV was a table model that sat on a broken Sylvania console. Behind these proceedings, a broken American Indian lumbered in the hot California sun. What an ironic scene. Could have been out of an Antonioni film.

The “Miss America” video is as raw as the song, which will be released on a forthcoming album. Here are the lyrics:

MISS AMERICA

Her cherry red lights in Tulane
her white fences in Springfield
her black gloves around your neck
dancing to “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”
her white panties always only
a twirl away on the silver screen
her darker dreams always only
a thrill away on the back streets

Oh, Miss America
Oh, Miss America

Her John Garfield Joan Crawford face
in the clutches of industrial light
her cocktail lie under the nightclub table
her tires kissing always kissing the feremoned pavement
her cowboy stand on the drifting plains
her palaces of corn and artichoke queens
her dumb fuck Brooklyn hallways
stinging of Pampers and malt liquor dreams

We hung our balls from a Cadillac hearse
we were young and full of cream
we screwed a waitress in Barstow
to see her dessert hunger breath
we sang the Lord’s Prayer on Market Street
“Uncle John’s Band” in Birmingham
we blew our guts in a Eureka Hotel
the day they took a giant leap for mankind

Copyright Allen Shadow